“A great wave of salty, sustaining literary fare” was how guest speaker Vincent Woods vividly described the joys of Cúirt at the launch of this year’s programme, at the House Hotel on Tuesday evening. The venue was thronged as Galway’s readers and writers turned out in force for the occasion.

The wait is almost over for the two Mayo schools who have been nominated for the Bord Gáis Energy Student Theatre Awards, which will take place on Wednesday next, May 17 in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.

Solar Bones, a novel written in a single 223-page sentence by Mayo author Mike McCormack has been voted the Bord Gáis Energy Book of the Year for 2016. Described as “a hymn to modern small-town life”, the experimental novel received unanimously positive reviews around the time of its publication.